Your First 90 Days: It's Not About You, It's About Them

In this series, professionals share how they rocked — or didn't! — the all-important first 90 days on the job. Follow the stories here and write your own (please include the hashtag #First90 in the body of your post).

Most managers find themselves answering to one or two bosses. Not so at the Financial Women’s Association (FWA), when I became executive director last year and found myself answering to a multitude of board and leadership members.

Were people automatically going to like me and let me do whatever I wanted? With so many professionals to answer to, it would be naive to think the answer was an easy "yes."

The temptation for most new managers is to hit the ground running. And indeed, I knew there were some things that had to be started in the first 90 days. We needed to launch an expansion of our programming, for example, and engage more partners to surpass our holiday benefit fund-raising goal.

But my priority at the outset was to try to resist the impulse to tell people at FWA — so many people — what they needed to do.

Instead, I spent extensive time in “hardcore hearing” — face-to-face meetings with individual board members and other stakeholders where I encouraged them to talk in depth about themselves and the association.

What are the FWA’s biggest strengths? What are the three most important things you’d focus on if you were me? What can we do better?

I took copious notes. And the interactions didn’t end there:

• I followed up each conversation with an email outlining what I had learned from the talk and how it would affect my decisions.
• I also sent handwritten thank-you notes — not a common practice in our age of electronic chatter, but the novelty of notes also showed that the conversations mattered to me.

Hardcore hearing is tough, and it may not come naturally to managers with a hands-on style and a strong sense of what the agenda should look like. Maybe their approach to getting things done isn’t as effective at a new firm; they may need more buy-in from colleagues and higher-ups than they’re used to seeking.

I realized that I needed to open myself up to different approaches in my new role. Reaching out to dozens of people at FWA helped me identify the influencers who could help me get things done, and who’s good at what — whether it’s strategic thinking, event planning or creative writing.

Listening gives a manager greater insight into the culture and the hidden rules that are a part of every organization. The manager gains a better sense of some of the challenges that must be faced, and identify the people in the organization who would make valuable partners in that effort — as well as those who could be difficult or obstructive.

All these conversations helped direct key decisions in the months that followed. I came to understand from these meetings that the FWA values internal collaboration. To reinforce this, an upcoming article in American Banker was published as a commentary written by organization members.

Sometimes things that you hear at work can also inspire you in broader ways.

I remember a top executive on our board who asked me how my new job was going.

She shared with me her own experiences when she started her job. Her boss had warned her it would take 18 months to really get the lay of the land. She didn’t believe it then, but came much later to see it was true.

“When I started my job,” she told me, “I’d have days when I was elated and days when I was in tears; when I thought it was going great and when I went home and thought, ‘This isn’t for me.’”

It was a great comfort to hear this — since I had shared many of those same sentiments.

The process of hardcore hearing, however, allowed me to gain perspective on these moments, learn and collaborate with others within the organization and increase the opportunity for better communications both internally and externally to the larger financial services community.